After being caught up in partisan gridlock for several months, a disaster relief bill to provide much-needed funding to areas of the country experiencing climate-related emergencies was all set to be signed into law by President Trump before Congress closed its doors for Memorial Day recess. That was, until one member of Congress raised objections to the legislation on the House floor.

In an effort to best encapsulate the powerful nature of the testimony of the HIV advocates present at the recent Congressional hearing on drug pricing around Gilead Sciences’ HIV prevention drug Truvada and the remarks of many of the members of the House, we thought it was best to provide you with their own word.

While federal legislators stall on large-scale health care reform, state houses are taking the matters into their own hands – particularly in Republican-controlled states leveraging the Trump Administration’s willingness to alter federal health regulations in programs like Medicaid, which covers approximately 40% of people living with HIV currently in care.

Although the House is surprisingly on-schedule in producing appropriations legislation, a separate funding bill foreshadows potentially difficult reconciliations with the Senate when fiscal year 2020 spending is debated.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced Thursday that the Trump Administration and Gilead Sciences—the manufacturer of Truvada—had reached an agreement for the pharmaceutical manufacturer to donate PrEP to up to 200,000 uninsured individuals annually through at least 2025, and potentially through 2030.

While there is bipartisan desire to avoid a government shutdown by funding the federal government for fiscal year 2020, beginning October 1st of this year, lawmakers have to agree on the basics of federal yearly spending before doing so – and then will still need to convince President Trump to sign a bill with higher spending plans into law.

In 2019, the United States is firmly in the throes of an opioid crisis that is increasingly being driven by injection drug use of substances like heroin and fentanyl that place those who inject drugs at high risk of overdose and of contracting infectious diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C (HCV). But government funding for syringe services program is woefully insufficient to meet the current need. For now, it may be up to private philanthropy to step in and fund SSPs where federal, state, and local governments will not.

Thomas Bridgen, the Grants Lead for people who use drugs at the Elton John Aids Foundation (EJAF) in London, on how he became involved in harm reduction, a funder’s perspective on investing in harm reduction, and his motivations for doing this work.